Governor Dean's Speech to the GLLC

Governor Dean's speech to the GLLC, June 21, 2007:

"I want to thank you for your support and hard work during this last election. Because of your hard work, we won in places people didn't expect us to win because people like you showed voters what it truly means to be a Democrat.

We took control of the House, electing Nancy Pelosi as the first woman to serve as speaker of the House and Barney Frank as the first openly-gay committee chair. We took control of the Senate and elected Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader. We now control the majority of governorships. We won 10 more state legislatures.

At each of these levels, Democrats have worked to promote equality for all Americans. Together, the record shows that the best way to stand up for the LGBT community is to elect Democrats.

Democrats like Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin have help lead a Democratic Congress, which has passed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, introduced the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to ban discrimination in the workplace, and introduced legislation to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Governors like Deval Patrick in Massachusetts, who courageously led the successful effort to keep an anti-marriage amendment off the ballot.

In fact, the contrast between Democrats and Republicans on the issues could not be more stark. During the last debates, every one of our Presidential candidates supported ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Every one. Not a single Republican candidate agreed.

Democrats campaigned on a set of issues and the need for change in 2006. And we are keeping our word. Our Democratic Congress has passed an economically sound balanced budget that cuts taxes for working families. We passed the federal minimum wage increase, and the 9/11 commission recommendations to make our communities safer. We are working to make college more affordable and we increased funding for Children's health insurance to help states provide insurance for low-income children.

This month, the voters saw crystal clear the difference between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. At their debate, every single Republican embraced President Bush’s failed, ineffective strategies.

Our candidates all stood united and firmly committed to responsibly ending the war in Iraq. They each spoke passionately against any misguided stay-the-course plan that keeps our men and women in uniform policing a civil war. They made it clear that they will not ignore the will of the American people and our military experts.

Our men and women in uniform in Iraq have done their job with extraordinary skill, courage and determination. They deserve an effective offensive strategy that is worthy of their dedication and skill. The best way to do that is to get them out of the middle of a civil war in Iraq. And the best way to do that is to elect a Democratic president in 2008.

I want to talk about young voters for a moment.

Young people are critical to this party and every single election we’ve got to focus on whether we think a large number are going to turn out or not. Because it turns out that if you vote in three elections, you’re probably going to vote for the rest of your life. And if you vote in three elections, you’re probably going to vote in that direction for the rest of your life. So every time we fail to reach out to young folks we take a 60 year hit for that. And we can’t do that.

What I say to young people—something every young person needs to learn: it was 13 years between the Montgomery Bus Boycott and signing the civil rights bill under Lyndon Johnson. Thirteen years. Not every one of those days was a good day. There was a lot of tough stuff along the way and the lesson that has been learned is that sometimes you are disappointed, sometimes you are temporarily set back, sometimes you are disappointed with your friends as well as angry at your enemies. But the trick is to understand that this is a long term process--this business of human rights—this is a long term process and when you get knocked down, you have to get up right away and put one foot in front of the other and keep going. It is a long term commitment and you do overcome if you make the long term commitment and work everyday and do not get sidetracked by the inevitable disappointments. That’s the message that our generation learned when it took us 10 years to get out of Vietnam.

We have a Justice Department right now that thinks it is more important to interfere with people’s right to vote and fire prosecutors who are prosecuting corrupt Republican Congressmen than it is to ensure the right to vote and catch terrorists. So, corruption of the democratic process is something that happens when we are not vigilant enough and it is a long term process to fix it.

Fighting for human rights, whether its women’s rights, African American’s rights, Hispanic rights, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans-gender rights is a lifetime of work, and the work goes on after our lives. This is never going to go away. I told you we need to talk to young people about being persistent and never giving up and understand defeat is common and the only way to overcome it is to get up and keep going.

The biggest mistake our generation made—our generation, which did so much to change this country —women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, and so forth, our generation, which did so much, also made a big mistake. Our mistake was that we got all these things done, changed the country, changed the establishment and all those things. Most of us decided, well, we can focus on our careers now, we can focus on other things now, we’ve done it, and we’ve achieved this extraordinary democracy.

But we forgot democracy is like any other human creation. It dies if you don’t nurture it. We never would have had George Bush as President of the United States if we had been engaged politically all the time and not given up. I understand that we have to attend to our private lives and that there are good things we deserve to be able to have kids and raise families. I understand that. But I also now understand that right wing ideologues can take over our government, that a small minority of people can push aside a large majority of people if they aren’t paying enough attention.

So the lesson that our generation can teach this extraordinary generation of young people which has used the Internet so incredibly, is that you can’t stop. That organizing communities all over the world, creating communities online -- not just in personal proximity of each other -- is the single most democratizing tendency. I think the Internet is the single most extraordinary invention for the preservation of democracy since the printing press. That it is not enough to do all those things. You have to make a lifetime commitment. Not a life time commitment 24 hours a day because we know you have to live and grow and have families and all those other things that people do. But it has to be a lifetime commitment to making America a better place, and by making America a better place, we need to undo the extraordinary damage that has been done to America in the last eight years, where a small group of people representing no one but themselves put their own interests ahead of the interests of the United States of America and forgot to govern effectively. And we will do better when the Democrats take over the White House in 2008. We need an immigration bill that is fair, we need a defense policy that is tough, and we need a governance philosophy that gives us fiscal stability.

I want to close by talking about some of the things we have done.

We have caught up to the Republicans in terms of technology. We now have a voter file that is as good as theirs. Forty seven states are interconnected. When it works at its best -- we have someone running for city council in St. Paul, Minnesota - and when she campaigns, she uses our voter file for the state of Minnesota, and it’s free and the condition she uses it under is that all the things she finds in the electorate come back to us so they are ready to use in the presidential election, or by the governor or congressman or the school board person or whomever it is. If you get 20,000 people running for city council all over America, that’s a pretty powerful voting list. We are a team, not individual candidates. We have to remember that. So that’s one.

Two, in six states last time around, we identified people purely by their commercial profile--figured out how that coordinated with who they were likely to vote for--and with an 85% accuracy rate delivered Democratic voters to the polls without even asking them anything about their preference. That makes an enormous amount of difference. It is the core of this broad so-called 72 hour strategy the Republicans have. We can do that even better than they can. So those are all great things. We have profited thanks to a bunch of 25 year olds who slept under their desks for two years at the DNC.

But there is one thing that we need to do that we have not yet done. All over we are making progress. The presidential year is the year of the greatest evolution of the democratic message. These really extraordinary candidates—and I can say this because I was in the last field. This is about the strongest field I’ve seen running for president among the Democrats in a long time.

Republicans have known for over 15 years that people don’t vote on issues. There are parts of various campaigns in this room. I’ll bet not one of you has chosen a candidate based on their 15 page health care paper. I’ll bet not one of you has chosen a candidate based on the differences in their education policy or even their defense policy. The reason you are choosing the candidates you choose is because of your values. That’s why people vote in this country; they vote their values and they vote their hearts.

People vote based on their emotions and based on their values. And we need to speak about our values.

The fight for equality under the law is such a value. The fact of the matter is it is not about whether a man should marry a man or not. This is about real core values held by a vast majority of Americans. Equal rights under the law for every single American. I don’t think we ought to get involved in who should marry who. I think we should say you have an obligation as an American citizen that every single person running for office -- be they Republican, Independent or Democrat -- has an obligation to stand up for equal rights under the law for every single American. Equal rights under the law for every single American. Every American deserves federal benefits, deserves hospitalization rights, rights to serve in the military, right to inherit property, right to have a spouse or a loved one come in from another country under immigration laws, the right to be treated the same way under the tax policy.

I don’t care what you call it as long as every single right is due to every single American. And while we’re playing this argument out, we ought to perhaps mention that the first person to take a bullet for George Bush in Iraq was an Army private who was a gay man. The first person wounded in Iraq. It seems to me that when folks like that come back to this country they deserve to be treated not the way George Bush treated them at Walter Reed Hospital, but to have equal rights under the law for every single American. Every single American.

Now, I’m not believing that this is going to work for people who don’t believe there ought to be same sex marriages to adopt the position that there should be. That’s not the point of this. The point of this is to say, as my last question, how many of you have been in a room someplace the last few years where you had to overhear this conversation or have been in this conversation: “gee, I’m a Democrat, and I can’t tell you what the Democratic Party stands for.”

How many of you have heard that? Right. And why is that? Of course you could tell them what the Democratic Party stands for: for a decent education policy, for helping people go to college, universal health care. There’s a long list of things. The reason why you have that conversation is because people don’t remember long lists of things; People want to understand what is in somebody’s heart before they decide who they vote for.
So I would propose three values that we ought to be really clear about that the Democrats stand for. The first is fairness. It’s a good value to start with because people believe we’re fair, and they don’t believe the Republicans are. Fairness is a value embraced by the American people. If it hadn’t been, the Civil Rights revolution wouldn’t have succeeded. And frankly we wouldn’t have separate states that do grant equal rights under the state law to everybody including gay and lesbian and bisexual, transgender Americans. Fairness encompasses all kinds of things that we believe in. If you focus on fairness, you can go to health care, you can go to education, you can go to equal rights under the law, you can do whatever you have to do. Fairness is the core concept that people will remember.

The next one is toughness and strength. People won’t vote for somebody they think isn’t strong enough to defend them against terrorists. Now we have a big problem, because ever since Vietnam, the Rush Limbaughs and the Bill O’Reillys and the right wingers of the world painted us as a weak party afraid to stand up for America. But we also have an extraordinary opportunity to brand ourselves as the party of strength now because the American people have seen five years of Republicans talking tough and they now understand that being tough enough to defend America is not the same thing as sending 150,000 American men and women to fight in a country that they don’t belong in and then get treated the way they were treated when they got home to Walter Reed Hospital. The American people want tough and smart. Not tough and foolish and not lying to the American people before they sent our troops to Iraq.

The last one that I want to talk to you about is fiscal responsibility. Personal accountability. I talked about what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid did when they got to the legislature in terms of that. The reason this is important is you know, when I was governor, I was very conservative about money. And so my more progressive Democratic friends used to be a little irked. Several of them accused me of being a Republican. But, at the end of the 12 years that I was governor, all kids under the age of 18 in my state had health insurance. We made well-child visits for every child in my state and then follow-up services, and our child abuse rate had dropped by 40% and child foster care under 12 had dropped by 30%. We had the same amount of funding behind every child in the state regardless of what part of the state they resided in. We had made huge changes. And we were able to do that because the first thing I did was erasing the deficit left to me by my Republican predecessor. We put ourselves in good shape so that these programs would be sustainable. It’s not fair to borrow money to give tax cuts or starve programs if you can’t fund them for the foreseeable future. So, I make the case for personal accountability and fiscal responsibility because if you want to be a true progressive, you have got to figure out a way to sustain these programs for the long period.

Those three values—fairness, strength and toughness, and fiscal responsibility—will play as well in New York City as in Alabama and in Utah, where, incidentally, we won two mayoral races in 2005 because we stopped being afraid to knock on doors in Alabama and Utah. You can win a race as a national Democrat on those issues. It will erase the idea that in conservative states that you have to run away from the national Democratic Party. You can’t run away from the national Democratic Party. You are a Democrat or you are not a Democrat. And you cannot win elections as a Democrat if you spend your time pretending that you are a Republican. There are core values for this party. And core values are what people want to see the Democrats have: fairness, strength, or toughness, and fiscal responsibility. If we exhibit those values, every place we go, we can talk about any issues we want. But if we put it in the framework of those values, we will win an awful lot of elections for a long time to come.

So I want to close by saying thank you. This is the community that gave me my start in the presidential race for which I will be forever grateful. This is the community that supplied probably three quarters of the early fundraising. And while my presidential race wasn’t successful in capturing the White House, it has been successful in fundamentally changing the Democratic Party. So we will be everywhere, we will stand up for everyone in all these places like Mississippi and Utah and Alabama. And we will not stop. We will have a long, sustained effort. And we will not stop until this country assumes the moral leadership that we gave up the day that George Bush was elected. We will win because we will work harder than the other guys and because we again need to restore America’s moral greatness. Those of you in this room who have made a lifetime of standing up for yourselves in very difficult circumstances are in fact the harbingers of moral greatness.

Thanks very much."